Which of the following best assesses a child's phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in words. This skill is foundational for successful reading and language development. Rhyming and segmentation tasks directly engage children in identifying sounds within words, which is critical for developing phonemic awareness.

Rhyme tasks require children to recognize similarities in sounds at the end of words, while segmentation tasks ask children to break words into their individual phonemes. For example, if a child is asked to segment the word "cat" into its individual sounds /k/, /æ/, and /t/, they are demonstrating their phonemic awareness.

In contrast, word recognition tests assess a child's ability to read grade-level words, which involves a broader set of skills beyond just phonemic awareness. Letter sound correspondence tasks focus on the relationship between letters and their sounds, which while related, do not specifically assess the manipulation of sounds in spoken language. Comprehension assessments evaluate understanding of the meaning of text but do not measure phonemic awareness or sound manipulation skills. Therefore, rhyming and segmentation tasks are most directly aligned with assessing a child's phonemic awareness.